ESPORTS IS ALREADY A SPORTS CAREER

REPORTING FROM COLUMBIA, S.C. — Motivations behind National Basketball Association (NBA) owners’ investment in esports range from seeing future crossover potential in the fanbase to increasing value for existing team sponsors to attracting the best of the next generation of front office employees. It’s not as much about how it will be directly monetized as it is about how many ways it can be monetized.
Bill Sutton, Bill Sutton Associates and a founding director at University of South Florida, Tampa, cited Philadelphia 76ers CEO Scott O’Neil, one of the first to invest in an eSports team, as one who is “creating this entire portfolio approach….Other teams I’ve worked with are throwing money at it. Now they’re putting analytics teams on it and growing numbers. I don’t see the cash flow slowing down anytime soon – this is the soup du jour, where everyone wants to be right now.”
Sutton was participating in a panel on the explosion of eSports during the 20th annual Sport, Entertainment and Venues Tomorrow conference (SEVT) here March 22-24. SEVT is produced by the University of South Carolina and Venues Today.
Steve “Ryu” Rattacasa, owner/manager, Selfless Gaming, advised there is a huge future in eSports management, just as data analytics were touted in another session as a career opportunity.
But eSports is an immersive career, Sutton warned. His son left Google to work for Riot Games, which publishes League of Legends, and the interview process was eight months. He had to become proficient in the game to join the company because the game is the company culture, Sutton said.
Rattacasa started his career as a gamer. Now he represents players and teams. He finds the influx of external money from traditional sports organizations a challenge, but he’s fine with being Triple A. “We’re the small guy now. Our teams are very good but we don’t have millions of dollars. So what we’ve done is taken the strength of being knowledgeable of games, players and the environment and built players up with traditional marketing, developed their personal brand and then flipped them to traditional sports owners like Shaquille O’Neal.”
It’s the Wild West and ripe with opportunity for sports entrepreneurs, said Kenny Sugishita, ELEAGUE coordinator for WME/IMG. “We focus on treating the players as well as possible so they want to come back. We’re the first tournament host to always put some portion of our season on TV.” The challenge is that it’s extremely difficult to organize tournaments because the players are always traveling, the fans are spread out and sponsors have different needs, he said.
As a venue manager, Michael Enoch, Sandy Springs (Ga.) Performing Arts Center, sees huge potential for building an eSports business in his theater, just as he did at Mercedes-Benz Arena, Shanghai, China, where he worked for AEG. In Shanghai, League of Legends tournaments drew 9,000-12,000 people, were priced $70-$150, and ran three days, starting with a concert on Friday and gaming Saturday and Sunday. The venue needs to have enough bandwidth, he said. And it’s a challenge to figure out how to monetize merchandise/software sales. “It’s hard to calculate what they’re selling,” Enoch said.
Michael Farris, Aspire Group, works  with collegiate-focused organizations like the Collegiate Starleague, where participants play for scholarships, and University League of Legends, a string of clubs on campuses. “College kids are interested in going to a live event and will pay $50-$70 to see eSports teams. They are not willing to travel; but they will go to something in their market,” Farris said
The Sixers are setting up eSports camps and clinics, all the things one would see in basketball, Sutton said. “The sky is the limit. This might be like Apple stock in 1980. People who are buying this have no idea what to do with it.” Riot’s League of Legends grosses $1.7 billion a year and it’s free to play and has no sponsorships right now, Sutton added.
The new generation of fans wants to experience, not just watch. Sutton sees the merger of eSports and Virtual Reality as the future.
The new generation of fans that reject Dish Network or Comcast, “we call them cord cutters,” are giving way to the “cord nevers,” Rattacasa said. The ‘cord nevers’ are never going to watch a basketball game. “They don’t have that interest.”